3 hours ago
4
FILM
Bugonia ★★★
(MA 15+) 118 minutes
Yorgos Lanthimos must be the most frustrating filmmaker working today.
Craziness is his stock-in-trade. Whether it works for him depends on whether he’s employing quantity control.
In his collaborations with Australian screenwriter Tony McNamara – The Favourite and Poor Things – the madness was moderated by the pointedness of the films’ visual and verbal wit. Each worked in synch with the other to lend form and create satire.
Jesse Plemons (right) with Aidan Delbis in Bugonia.Credit: Atsushi Nishijima/Focus Features.
The director’s latest film, Bugonia, gives us Lanthimos Unleashed. The craziness is unrestrained, the mood swings are extreme and the conclusion is an elaborate – and admittedly hilarious – practical joke making nonsense of the whole thing.
Perhaps Lanthimos’ greatest gift is his ability to persuade talented actors to go along with him at his most ridiculous. In this film, Emma Stone delivers one particularly absurd passage of dialogue with such conviction I could almost believe she meant every word.
The action begins by plunging us into a story that could have been plucked from the daily news from Trump’s US. Teddy (Jesse Plemons) is gripped by a conspiracy theory. He’s convinced that his employer, an international pharmaceutical company, is run by aliens from the Andromeda Galaxy and they’re plotting to take over Earth. Teddy’s mother is already a victim. She’s in a coma after one of the company’s experimental drug trials.
Now Teddy is trying to talk his younger cousin, Don (Aidan Delbis), into helping him kidnap the company’s CEO, Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), and keep her prisoner in their old house in the woods until she admits to being an Andromedan and takes them to her planet to interview Andromeda’s emperor. Plausible? Irrefutable. Teddy has done the research.
This scenario sounds as if it could have sprung from Lanthimos’ capacious imagination, yet the film turns out to be an English-language remake of Save the Green Planet!, an obscure black comic sci-fi-cum-horror movie by Korean director Jang Joon-hwan. Bugonia’s producers hired screenwriter Will Tracy (Succession) to adapt it before approaching Lanthimos.
At its best, it could be interpreted as a metaphor for the intellectual climate in the galaxy according to Trump. If somebody were to accuse the president of being an Andromedan emperor in disguise, I imagine he could well fancy the idea. A new world conquered with minimal effort.
‘It’s as if violence, shock, absurdity and silliness have been tossed into a blender.’
And Michelle, whom we begin to observe at work and at home, is not shaping up as a character over-endowed with warmth, wisdom and generosity. She’s an arrogant bully and an energetic kick-boxer, and puts up a fierce fight.
Teddy is powered by an all-consuming obsession and by the time they have done with one another, she’s starting to resemble the alien he believes her to be. As with Stone, Plemons is so completely immersed in the role he doesn’t strike a false note. It’s a consummate portrait of insanity, made all the more remarkable because he’s trying hard to make sense.
The film rapidly becomes more unhinged than Teddy himself. It’s as if Lanthimos tossed violence, shock, absurdity and silliness into a blender, waiting to see which comes out on top. In the end, the froth wins and silliness prevails. I left with a smile on my face, but I also felt as if I had been conned.
Reviewed by Sandra Hall
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